In the following essay, Charney calls attention to the cruel, even gruesome elements of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act III, scene ii. He argues that in this monologue Hamlet is chiefly concerned with dissuading himself from the impulse to kill his mother.

As a matter of principle, some hardy critics never read a play before seeing it in order not to spoil the freshness of the effect. If a play doesn't make sense in its oral and presented form, then there is something radically wrong with it. Have things come to such a sorry pass that we need to read the play as a libretto, translating a foreign and incomprehensible tongue? And what about those theatrical spectators with their little flashlights aglow, turning the pages of the text during...